When I was making clothing for Althea, I discovered that even though I have a full supply of reproduction AND authentic historic fabrics, all of them either had prints that were too large for this scale, or were on a fabric that was too heavy too manipulate for tiny clothing.
I scanned in a number of my fabrics, shrunk the pattern, and then printed them on printable fabric using the computer. If this fabric is too heavy for your use, there is also a way to use freezer paper to fuse a lighter weight fabric long enough to print on it. This will make a fabric that is less colorful, and might look similar to lawn.
There are some sample scans on the printable page at the top. I'll be adding more, and there is no reason you couldn't use the wallpaper printables . To print them, you need to a) right click on the image b) save as c) put them in a folder named fabric d) open them e) size them to your needed size f) put paper in your printer the right side up g) print on your best printing setting. You might want to do a sample print on a piece of paper using the draft setting to make sure it looks the way you want it.
To scan your own fabric, you will need a photo editor such as Picasa to resize the fabric and probably to work on the color. The neat thing about Picasa is that you are able to make different colorways- example, to turn it sepia colored or tint it to your desired colors.
Making the fabric:
This is all three of the types of fabric : fabric made on commercial fabric paper using a printer, off white muslin backed with freezer paper , off white lawn backed with freezer paper. You can see some variation in color, with the commercial on the top, the muslin on the bottom left, and the lawn on the right bottom.The difference- the way it works, particularly drapes and gathers. Excuse the quality of the pictures- you may just have to believe me right now.
Sewing using the different backing.
Please feel free to ask questions! fddlj@aol.com
I scanned in a number of my fabrics, shrunk the pattern, and then printed them on printable fabric using the computer. If this fabric is too heavy for your use, there is also a way to use freezer paper to fuse a lighter weight fabric long enough to print on it. This will make a fabric that is less colorful, and might look similar to lawn.
There are some sample scans on the printable page at the top. I'll be adding more, and there is no reason you couldn't use the wallpaper printables . To print them, you need to a) right click on the image b) save as c) put them in a folder named fabric d) open them e) size them to your needed size f) put paper in your printer the right side up g) print on your best printing setting. You might want to do a sample print on a piece of paper using the draft setting to make sure it looks the way you want it.
To scan your own fabric, you will need a photo editor such as Picasa to resize the fabric and probably to work on the color. The neat thing about Picasa is that you are able to make different colorways- example, to turn it sepia colored or tint it to your desired colors.
Making the fabric:
Sewing using the different backing.
 |
| The muslin on the freezer paper backing. This gathers medium well and would be good for the skirt fabric. Color is definitely truer. |
 This is the off white lawn on freezer paper. You can make really small stitches, particularly with a small quilting needle, and it gathers well enough to use for sleeves . If I wanted the color to closer to the original, I can edit in Picasa before printing. Later, I'll add a tutorial on how to gather smaller fabric using cable gathering. |
 To print the fabric with freezer paper backing. |
 |
| What you need- freezer paper, iron and material. Bright white would be best to get a good color. I did this with both the lawn and the muslin. Pretty easy, you just iron the freezer paper on the fabric, cut it to the size of a white piece of paper , and put it in your printer. The lawn made a terrible noise, and wrinkled a bit, but made it out in one piece. |
 |
| The freezer paper I used. |
No comments:
Post a Comment
I love comments! Especially if you have ideas or suggestions!